Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(15)

So if we have no unambiguous images of Jocasta, what of an ambiguous one? There are fragments of a large krater in the Archaeological Museum in Syracuse, Sicily.18 They show a grave, dark-haired, bearded man and a woman standing behind him, holding her robe up to her face. She has a deeply serious expression. They must be the parents of the two small children with dark curls and long robes who stand beside them – one in front of their father, one next to their mother. The adults seem to be receiving news from a white-haired man to our left, and whatever the news is, it apparently isn’t good. Behind the robed woman is a column and, behind that, a second woman stands, facing the opposite way. Her hand is held up to her cheek, fingers splayed: is she eavesdropping on the main scene?

Expert pot-readers have suggested that this scene is from Sophocles’ play: that it represents the moment when the Corinthian messenger reveals that Oedipus was adopted and Jocasta realizes the terrible truth, a truth that her husband will soon work out. Her robe lifted to cover her face gives us a visual jolt, reminding us of the fabric she will tie round her neck. The pins which hold the drapes of her dress in place are the ones Oedipus will use to put out his eyes. The two children are Antigone and Ismene, the couple’s daughters, who aren’t present in the messenger scene in Sophocles, but appear at the end of the play to bid their father farewell. Perhaps the vase painter has included that element from the later scene for additional pathos.

But none of this ingenious reading tells us who the other woman, the listening one, might be. There are no other female characters in Sophocles’ play, besides Jocasta and the children. And are the children definitely girls? The pot has been assumed to be Oedipus and Jocasta because their two daughters are the girls we are mostly likely to remember when we think of young sisters in Greek myth. The rest of the scene – older man, younger man and woman, other woman nearby – is pretty non-specific. But if the girls are actually boys, as Professor Edith Hall has proposed,19 the scene could be from another play entirely. Have we assumed the children are girls because we expect girls to have long hair and long dresses? That sounds plausible enough until Hall points out the similarity with a vase painting of a scene from Euripides’ Alcestis.20 Alcestis has a son and a daughter, and the son appears to be wearing a long robe, just like the children on the Syracuse pot. So perhaps the couple on this pot are Oedipus and Jocasta, but they may well not be.

Jocasta has been similarly ill-served by later artists. Again, Oedipus is often shown solving the riddle of the Sphinx (which is itself an unusual image: how often does one see a painting which can best be described as ‘Man Thinks of Answer to Random Question’?) but rarely with his wife. There are two interesting nineteenth-century French paintings of her, one by Alexandre Cabanel and one by édouard Toudouze. Cabanel’s Oedipus Separating from Jocasta (1843)21 shows Oedipus embracing one of his daughters, presumably Antigone. The other daughter, Ismene, is catching the body of her mother as she loses consciousness. An old woman behind her – swaddled in a green robe, her face a mask of horror – helps Ismene support Jocasta’s weight. Jocasta is falling backwards from her husband: only the very tips of the fingers of her left hand graze Oedipus’ hand as she slips away.

Twenty-eight years later, édouard Toudouze22 painted a version of the scene we have looked at in Euripides’ The Phoenician Women. Oedipus sits holding the white hand of his wife, who is draped in black, dead at his feet. His old battle-helmet is on the step next to him, decorated with a sphinx, commemorating his great victory over the monster. A flame-haired Antigone comforts her father, looking down at her poor mother. Antigone’s two brothers, Polynices and Eteocles, are laid out behind her, united in death as they could not be in life. Every other character, dead or alive, is obscured by the presence of Oedipus. Even their names are lost: the painting is called Farewell of Oedipus to the Corpses of his Wife and Sons.

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Does this give us a hint at the answer of where Jocasta disappears to? The fixation on Oedipus sucks all the light and air out of the rest of the Theban cycle. This is exemplified by Freud’s response to Sophocles: it’s Oedipus who gets the complex. The other characters in Oedipus’ immediate family never seem as fully formed because in practically every version of the myth they and their stories are different, and perhaps, as a modern audience, we simply prefer the certainty of Oedipus: always killing his father and marrying his mother, no matter what else happens. In some versions of the Theban saga, Polynices is the aggressor and Eteocles the victim; but sometimes it’s the other way round. In Sophocles’ version of Antigone, she is the older sister, engaged to her cousin Haemon, but forced to suicide by the cruel regime of her uncle, Creon. In the fragments we have of Euripides’ version of Antigone, however, she survives the wrath of her uncle, and lives to marry Haemon; they go on to have a son. In Euripides’ The Phoenician Women, things are different again: Haemon doesn’t survive to marry her. And when the French playwright, Jean Anouilh, took on Antigone’s story in 1944, he reversed the birth order of Ismene and Antigone: appropriate, if excessive, religious fervour in an older sibling in fifth-century BCE Athens becomes the behaviour of a rebellious younger sibling during the Second World War. As we change, so these characters have also changed as if to match us.

We can find out more about Jocasta, unpeel the layers to discover what they might reveal, but we have to look hard to do it. In the work of poets and playwrights, she shifts so we can never quite get a fix on her, this woman who marries her son and either does or doesn’t take her own life, does or doesn’t bear four more children, does or doesn’t become a diplomatic political power in her own right, does or doesn’t take her life when her sons destroy one another. And in the visual arts she disappears from view almost entirely. I suspect we don’t see her reflected back at us from paintings because she has committed the ultimate sin against art: she is an older woman. And while painters never tire of showing us women and girls in their twenties or teens, they tend to be far less keen to show us a woman in her forties or fifties.